Listeners of Black Terry Cat will have no doubt: Rubinos is a unique presence, with a sharp ability to make pressing issues about identity and society into funky, exhilarating music.

Otero War is a centrist indie rock record at a time when a center doesn’t really exist and there are vastly more interesting and inclusive things going on just outside the frame.

After confidently striking out from Delorean’s cocoon of reverb on Apar, Lopetegi has returned but the rest of the band hasn’t, giving Muzik a curiously unbalanced, deflated mix.

A step left of center yet still striking familiar chords right on time, Allen Toussaint show us his understated brilliance one final time.

True Sadness is a record that can’t seem to get out of its own way. Almost every track is bloated with instrumentation.

Far from aiming for some grand unified statement, The Mountain Will Fall feels a lot more like a DJ set--a curated grab bag of ideas that overlap and collide, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Track-by-track, it tells a clearer story than her excellent debut and a more sweeping one than many movies.

At their best, they achieve late-’90s VH1 rock heights, which is not such a bad target to hit. ... At their worst, they’re affected and not in an interesting way. But these are both extremes, on a record otherwise scrupulous to never sound at all extreme.

Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic smolders with emotion, and yet Kasan’s aloofness—even when he’s shouting—sounds like a protective mechanism against truly letting himself go. Framed by the derivative music, Kasan sounds as removed from his feelings as the rest of us do expressing them via memes from inside the stultifying safety of our digital cubicles.

On Puberty 2, every note she's played comes together. It’s a resounding personal statement and the clearest sign that while she might be an “indie rock” artist, she currently stands apart from--and above--much of the genre.

Still Brazy solidifies YG as a torch-bearer for west coast gangster rap.

The love in his music is as terrible as it is beautiful, a wrenching act of spiritual determination. Swans make this sound effortless, though, in a fitting end to a remarkable chapter of their career.

When Silkjær traces his vocals over the lead guitars, it’s enough to make “Uncombed Hair” and “Pills” stick. Otherwise, A Youthful Dream can only push through its weaker melodies and reverb through self-will.

You Will Never Be One of Us will live up to the expectations of anyone who’s experienced a Nails album before.

The sweetness of their gaze only makes the melodies on case/lang/veirs seem more familiar, resonating deep within some distant memory while still sounding fresh. The hooks are mostly vocal-led, but producer Tucker Martine and the small band of players (including Glenn Kotche on percussion) color them perfectly.

Were it not for these issues [the album’s lyrical stasis scans as disappointing] and the B-Side's proliferation of yawn-inducing, stoned slow jams, The Getaway could have potentially bested By The Way as the Peppers’ best work post-Californication.

The good news about The Digging Remedy is that it’s lovely and listenable for any longtime followers, or for anyone remotely interested in the kind of melodic IDM defined by this piece. However, it is neither an exciting deviation nor a refinement; as such, it’s really just more of an already-good thing, albeit packaged less delicately.

Tracks such as “There Was a Button” and “Traanc” are acceptable as minimal-house DJ tools, but as greater parts of a long-playing whole, they seem lost for a broader context--a context Dear previously had no trouble offering. Only at Alpha’s tail end does Audion’s (and Dear’s) personality assert itself.

On My One is precisely the kind of mistake that pop stars make when they think they’re smarter than the system.

It may not go down as one of Neil’s definitive works, but Earth achieves something Young hasn’t been able to accomplish on record in a while: he's made an album worth spending some time with.

Liquid Cool is just another likable if unexceptional lo-fi electro-pop record.

While the result is a 12-track standard edition full of potential hits, the brunt of it rests on interchangeable tempos from existing, already-charting singles.

At various points, Faraway Reach is: a shrug; a call-to-arms; a balm. At its best, it's all these things at once.

The first third is playful if not quite memorable. ... But as “N” swoops down, with its slow, throbbing bassline, primitive drum machine pattern, echoing chimes, and flecks of flamenco guitar, you wonder if Lissvik might have pulled a fast one and gone back into an old hard drive to plunder some old Studio session, so dead-on is the sound.

If Diarrhea Planet’s goal is just to be a memorable, messily great live band, they’re well on their way. But if they want their records to live on, they need to decide what they're trying to achieve, and figure out how to deliver it more effectively offstage.

Tape-chewed textures and digital glitches initially defined Wyatt’s first few releases, but there’s a remarkable clarity throughout Union and Return that belies the fact that for all the beauty of his fourth album, his inherent weirdness still squirms beneath the surface.

Jackie Lynn’s only significant weakness is that, even though individual songs benefit from brevity, the record is too short. Its eight tracks take up only 22 minutes, and two of those tracks are micro-length instrumentals; it’s half an album at most.

Every darker, weirder impulse got glossed over while the music gives an agreeable shrug.

Many of the tracks on his last album felt like sketches—the kernel of an idea, abandoned quickly. The same sensibility holds here, but even the simplest idea is stretched across a much bigger frame, to six or seven or even eight minutes. That’s important; you need the time to sink into these things. After a spell, you can’t say whether you've been listening to a given piece for two or 20 minutes.

It’s fitting the trio recorded it in a repurposed slaughterhouse, because Fall Forever is the work of a band gutting its sound and watching it bleed out.

Before Wild Things, Brown scrapped an entire album that, from press indications, probably sounded a lot like Anxiety; neither she nor the people she said heard it was happy with the results, but one wonders if it was really that bad, or just not commercial and crowd-pleasing enough. Wild Things collapses over the strain to be both.

Taylor is no stranger to wearing his heart on his sleeve, Piano takes that notion one step further--it’s as if Taylor is taking his heart out for everyone to see, then discreetly leaving it on your coffee table.

The result is some of his most exciting work since Isis disbanded.

Ultimately, the picture that emerges on Twentyears is a simplified version of Air that swaps out most of their quirks for only their most palatable qualities. It’s a lite version of the band, and a frustrating missed opportunity.

Despite these superficial similarities [to their 1995 debut album], repeat spins of Strange Little Birds ultimately belie an older, wiser reincarnation of that youthful rage, not just a cheap retrospective.

Light years from a mere slap-dash rarities compilation, The Other Side of the River takes some of a seminal rock musician's most interesting sketchworks and reimagines them as his magnum opus.

Levitate leverages rave nostalgia to get to a deeper truth: Free your inner child, and your ass and mind will follow.

[“Hard Sleep”] stands out as a rare home-run on an album too blandly ambitious to stick in the memory.

Musically, it’s his most adventurous album since Graceland, filed with strange rhythmic kinks and a junkyard’s worth of barely identifiable sounds.

It's rare to find complex, personal songs about love and relationships matter-of-factly sung from a queer perspective, and in that respect alone Tegan and Sara remain a crucial voice in the pop landscape. Elsewhere on the album, things a just a little less distinct.

The sonics are familiar, as is the trajectory.

Ash & Ice is an album of quality comedown tracks surrounded by run-of-the-mill rockers that plateau instead of peak.

There’s just enough to think about without getting fatigued, as the Strokes continue to toy with the sound of their late period.

Get In was recorded last year, but it sounds like it could have been made at any time over the intervening decade.

What doesn’t work as much are the attempts to make Masterpiece feel overly homemade.

By embracing the expanse, his music has gotten bigger, and more universal.

With its variations in mood, tone, and personnel, Basses Loaded plays more like compilation of B-sides culled from multiple recording sessions spanning several years.

Whitney might not reinvent anything, but they sound perfect right now, and it’s hard to argue with being in the right place at the right time.

When Krug sticks to his strengths—off-the-beaten-path keyboard-driven rock n’ roll, with taut, wiry tunes that match his voice and wry wit--he generally succeeds. But his tendency to slow it down and draw it out leads him to take risks that often don’t pay off.

Despite Dâm’s preference for playing tracks pretty much all the way through--which suggests an infectious, wide-eyed passion for the music that fits into his mind-control powers--the mix is properly appreciated as a whole.

Finally, albeit in flashes, there are hints that Fifth Harmony may reach that peak.

Backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Tyler is able to summon a wide range of moods, from plaintive pastoral folk to a particular kind of kosmische American music that fuses Brad Cook’s spacey synths and Luke Schneider’s gorgeous pedal steel like a slow, steady breeze on a hot summer day.

[“Wall Fuck” is] short and snappy, gone too fast in an album that could’ve been streamlined to let moments like it shine. But maybe it’s the sound of floodgates opening.

His words come off poetically, and in its totality, Ology is a slow burn that grows more infectious as it plays.

At its best, the casual atmosphere makes for one of Kozelek’s loosest, lightest collections to date: something to throw on when you don’t have the emotional capacity for his more distinctive albums.

Congrats isn’t incoherent in its diversity, it just never seems to build on itself--the record lacks a definitive peak, and most of the individual tracks tend to just state their main idea fairly early on.

Folding Time serves as a stopgap for an aging sound without a firm grasp on its bearings. Should Sepalcure continue writing from their fixed point, they'll have to project further and further from its origin.

The results resemble dance music as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror: strangely distorted, sometimes goofy, and deeply pleasing on a simple, almost childlike level.

A trio of cuts toward the middle of Everything’s Beautiful suffers from feeling less robustly reimagined than the rest of the set--placing a slight drag on momentum.

Frankly, the energy and intensity that’s channeled into the first half of The Dream is Over feels utterly impossible, especially given the subject matter. But even at 31 minutes, Babcock’s relentless self-loathing can go from intoxicating to simply toxic.

What’s missing, though, is the central promise of a supergroup: the thrill of hearing established musicians in a truly different context. Minor Victories’ lineup may stem from different circles, but their approaches are so complementary that there’s rarely any tension or surprise.

The clear ambition of X-Communicate is to leave Welchez’s old persona behind and emerge, fresh and new, as something completely different, and by and large, that objective is achieved.

Mosey isn’t all gloom, though it boasts plenty of excellent bummer songs.

On Kidsticks, she no longer sounds like she has anything left to prove, which is precisely what's allowed her to make the riskiest album of her career. And she sounds like she's had the time of her life making it, too.

Simply put, the playing is more ambitious and varied on Goodness than on Home, Like NoPlace Is There, an album where the narrative drama manifests into some of the rawest anthems of unhinged youth and crippling self-loathing recorded this decade.

Enjoyable as it is, EP 4 does seem like smart risk management, a test run that confirms that whatever the group comes up with won’t be a Pixies-style disaster. As such, the rewards are modest.

The uneasy beats on Taste are part of what give that album its kick. Guitarist Geordie Gordon and drummer Adam Halferty also make both albums richer by providing dense textures and strong background vocals.

Should I Remain… is lighter, looser and more concise, in the same way that you refine your story once you’ve tried telling it a few times.

Earrings Off! is filled with these sorts of growing pains, ones that hopefully point to brighter pastures sometime soon for this promising band.

As a set of tracks for DJs to pick from, Rojus offers plenty of potential. As a front-to-back listening experience, it's almost paradise--but not quite the album that it wants to be.

Beyond the Bloodhounds isn’t a blues record per se, but in the grand tradition of the blues, it creates space to look your demons in the eye and acknowledge their foul existence without necessarily doing much about them.

It sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way.

Even if the results are uneven at times. Grande does not need to force any sort of spirit, she is full of it already. She just needs to find the Dangerous Woman within herself and let her break free.

His sparse yet driving music and the trenchant visual work accompanying are noteworthy elements of Allen’s four decades as an artist, but what stands out in revisiting Juarez now is the stunning poetry of the lines themselves. Allen’s words are a piquant kick throughout: raunchy, pithy, and richly redolent.

Kamikaze has a slightly slicker, glammier edge than its predecessors, as well as some unobtrusive strings on a couple of tracks, but the peppy backbeats, gang-shouted choruses, and fist-pumping enthusiasm remain.

Ullages opens up a greater sense of space for Eagulls to soar, but can feel more distant and isolating as a result.

The result is an album that creates its own world, one it feels like you could reach out and brush with your fingers.

Ashcroft always fares best when he sounds like he’s addressing another person in an intimate exchange rather than megaphoning the entire human race, and there are moments on These People where he reconnects with the steely-eyed conviction and restlessness that fueled his best songs.

As Nadler exorcises her own demons, she brings you along with her, making you feel a little less anxious about your own despair. She sees poetry in the mundane, elegance in the gloom.

The final product, then, feels adrift: just off the coast of delivering a discrete emotional impact, offering a sporadic, self-reflexive charm for fans who smile at Dylan’s every left turn, whether in spite of themselves or on principle.

Crime Cutz's weakness lies in its lack of diversity--you spend a lot of the record hoping for something to take them even further over the edge, but they continue to pull back until the very end.

Judged on its own merits, A New Wave of Violence is a fine hardcore record, one that manages to balance chaotic intensity with a workmanlike precision that few punk bands can muster.

Like the rest of his comedy oeuvre, Heidecker pulls no punches. In Glendale arrives as a fully formed beast, equal parts parody and confession of our universal lameness.

More important than this deft lyrical touch, though, is his ability to display it within a musically engaging song. Unlike some indie-rock songwriters, Toledo's lyrics don't just sit on the page. The choruses don't arrive at the expected moments or follow traditional shapes, but they hit hard nonetheless.

Cut and Paste is hooky and appealing; with a gear change, he could easily move into a realm where people are actually paying attention. For now, he's a very sweet stream in a cultural backwater.

The set ranges eclectically in both style and level of inventiveness. Most anyone with any kind of appreciation for the Grateful Dead will find probably at least an hour or three of music to dig and really groove with; Dead freaks might also find a good deal to snicker at.

The mindset of Skip a Sinking Stone is best entered with the intent of total immersion and allotting a similar amount of Mutual Benefit music to more conventional song structures and interludes can feel like a vision quest stopped too frequently for bathroom breaks.

Beneath all of this nihilism is some real skilled songwriting that includes complex rhyme schemes, swaggering rhythms, and stunning harmonies.

It’s familiar but new; varied but consistent; full of ambience but sturdy.

Oh No is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto that proves yet again the sad girls are not vulnerable and silent subjects.

Jameszoo's work is strongest when he tones down the overt jazz and instead parses the genre for specific sounds and ideas to embellish his electronic experimentations.

Coloring Book is one of the strongest rap albums released this year, and is destined to be on year-end lists aplenty. It's a more rewarding listen than Drake's recently released VIEWS; it's nearly as adventurous as The Life of Pablo.

The line separating Saturday night and Sunday morning is no thicker than a second hand; Yoyogi Park invites you to clear out a space inside that sliver of time, and to luxuriate in it.

With Nattesferd Kvelertak exploit an opportunity to create a sense of mystery. More importantly, they back it up with a group of songs that's virtually filler-free and loses little steam towards the end.

Arbor Labor Union have taken a respectable leap toward realizing the throbbing cosmic Americana that clearly rings in their souls.

Konnichiwa is as nakedly vulnerable Skepta has ever been, and it represents a tantalizingly wide-open door for grime. It’ll be our job as listeners to step through and discover what we’ve been missing.

Cohen will never be able to escape the context surrounding Bloom Forever, but he refuses to let himself be defined by tragedy. His bold, distinctive debut album stands a million miles from the celebrity circus, and will endure far longer than mawkish titillation.

While the shift towards tempered indie rock often robs Holy Ghost of the instant gratification of early MoBo, there isn’t a single clunker lyric that was wedged in for the sake of cleverness.